Like many people, I’ve been pushed out of the inner city by the housing crisis. I live in Tarneit, in Melbourne’s outer west. Every morning, I debate whether to spend two hours on public transport or try my luck driving across the West Gate Bridge. 
The West Gate is Australia’s most congested bridge; more than 200,000 vehicles cross it every day. A single accident can create gridlock for more than 20 kilometres. 
One day in early March, traffic was so bad that we were diverted out past the westernmost edge of the urban sprawl and into the paddocks, only to be stuck bumper to bumper anyway. 
I wondered what had happened. When I heard it was a climate protest, I smiled. 
Three climate activists had hired a truck and parked it across three lanes on the bridge, unfurling a banner: “DECLARE A CLIMATE EMERGENCY”. 
The voice of one of them, Bradley Homewood, a truck driver also from the western suburbs, was beamed through my car radio: “We’ve tried all the conventional methods of campaigning; none of them have worked, so we are engaging in non-violent civil resistance”. 
Say what you want about their tactics, but you have to admire the conviction. 
The protesters were arrested for “public nuisance”. Yet just across the bridge, in Southbank, police blocked many more lanes of traffic while escorting a cavalcade of climate criminals to the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
There they met for a special summit of ASEAN, the Association of South-East Asian Nations. 
While the West Gate protesters were remanded in custody, heads of state and mining billionaires were wining and dining, wheeling and dealing at the summit’s CEO lunch. 
In 2019, I linked arms with other climate activists at the same venue to blockade and disrupt another gathering of climate criminals: the International Mining and Resource Conference. I’ve blocked traffic and caused other disruptions protesting the climate crisis, among other things, more times than I can remember. In my mind, it’s the least I can do. 
Homewood said of their protest: “Climate breakdown will be much more of an inconvenience”. He’s right. 
As Green’s state MP Ellen Sandell, who backed the protesters, told reporters on the day: 
“We’ve already had literally thousands of people evacuated from their homes because of fires this year. We’ve had thousands and thousands of people without power because of storms exacerbated by climate change. These are the kinds of disruptions that we’re seeing already because of climate change.”
Violet Coco, another of the protesters, said in a statement:
“Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world, and thus one of the biggest contributors to the global death project that is already killing people via flood, fire, drought and famine.” 
While governments and capitalists responsible for increasing carbon emissions broke bread, Homewood and Coco were sentenced to 21 days in jail (they have since been released). 
“Civil disobedience in the form of strikes, blockades, marches and occupations has played a crucial role in the development of democracy, and helped to secure precious rights here and around the world—including women’s suffrage, eight-hour working days, racial legal equality and environmental protections”, Coco argued in an article for Crikey.
We can debate the relative merits of different protest methods, but one thing is clear: it’s right to rebel because we won’t change the world for the better by following all the rules. 
It’s the climate criminals, not the protesters, who should be jailed.

Beth Jackson

Climate criminals, not climate activists, should be jailed

Around 150 people gathered on 3 December at Melbourne’s State Library for a snap rally to protest two recent deaths in custody. On 29 November, a 30-year-old woman in Victoria died in hospital after being transferred from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a high-security women’s prison in Victoria. The next day, a 44-year-old woman died in Townsville Women’s Correctional Centre. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late.
“We’re here today for Heather, [and] her poor little children left without a mother”, Aunty Rea from Grandmothers Against Removals told the crowd, many of who held placards calling prison a death sentence for Indigenous people. The rally was organised by the victim’s family.
On Thursday, the Australian Institute of Criminology released its annual deaths in custody report, recording 82 deaths over the last year. Just last month, 43-year-old Glen Francis died in Maryborough Correctional Facility in Queensland, a 26-year-old Aboriginal man died in a Newcastle prison, and 45-year-old Gomeroi man Stanley Russel was shot by police in his own home in Sydney. In January last year, Veronica Nelson also died in Dame Phyllis Frost Centre after asking for medical attention more than 10 times in the hours before her death.
In June, an inquest into the 2017 death of Raymond Noel Lindsay Thomas found he was killed in a car crash while trying to escape police chasing him at 130 kilometres an hour. The fatal chase was initiated, according to police, because Thomas’ car looked “dodgy”.
In the 30 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, at least 485 Aboriginal people have died in custody. Its final report, released in 1991, made 339 recommendations for preventing such deaths. At least a third of the recommendations have still not been implemented.
Deaths in custody are preventable. They’re the result of unjustified and dangerous police pursuits, excessive force, denial of medical care and criminal neglect. Yet no-one is held accountable.
Just one day after celebrating National Close the Gap Day, the Victorian government announced its plans to further expand the capacity of Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, the high security women’s prison where most Indigenous women prisoners in Victoria are sent. According to the Homes Not Prisons campaign, this expansion will include two new 20-bed “Management Units” for solitary confinement. National Indigenous Times reported this is just one of seven new prison construction announcements made by the government in the past 18 months.
The Royal Commission’s 1991 report recommended “imprisonment should be utilised only as a sanction of last resort”. Thirty years later, the racist over-policing of Indigenous people continues, and Indigenous Australians remain the most incarcerated people on earth. The introduction of mandatory sentencing, and the tightening of parole laws has disproportionately increased the rate of Indigenous incarceration, especially among women. Despite only making up about 2 percent of the overall population, Indigenous people are 28 percent of Australia’s prison population. Indigenous women make up 34 percent of Australia’s prison population.
Friday’s snap rally was a reminder that behind these statistics are communities torn apart and far too many lives cut short. But amid the grief, the determination to continue fighting for justice shines through. As veteran Gooniyandi activist Viv Malo put it, “We must speak out”.

Speaking out against deaths in custody shame

In an opinion piece in the Age titled “I doubt I’ll bother attending another climate rally”, Nicola Philp laments: “I have begun to think that this traditional form of mass protest may have run its course. In the age of social media and very busy lives, such disruption to passers-by may actually be detrimental to the cause and serve to tick people off more than engage them with the issue of protest”.
She’s wrong. After the re-election of the coal-loving Liberals, and the announcement by the Queensland Labor government that they’ll fast track approvals for the Adani coal mine, last week’s climate march was a beacon of hope.
Thousands of mostly young, angry protesters flooded the steps of Parliament House and spilled on to the intersection with homemade signs and banners. When we began to march, the streets of Melbourne were filled with the sound of thousands of voices demanding change.
Passers-by I saw clapped and cheered from sidewalks and trams. I looked up to see people smiling and waving from the windows and balconies of restaurants and office buildings. Construction workers stopped what they were doing to watch and egg us on from the scaffolding above. 
And why wouldn’t they? Countless surveys have long shown the majority are on our side. 
The ABC’s 2019 Federal Election Vote Compass found more than 80 percent of Australians want the government to take more action on climate change. Nearly 90 percent want more renewable energy. And as for disruptive protests – despite the protestations of both Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten, who wish they’d stay in school – a ReachTel poll showed 63 percent support the high school strikers who’ve skipped class to attend protests just like this one.
After bringing us such modest reforms as the right to vote without owning property, women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day, the end of the Vietnam War, civil rights, equal pay, land rights legislation, free education, the fall of Tony Abbott and marriage equality, to name a few, has the humble tradition of mass protest finally “run its course”?
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish high school student who sparked the global School Strikes for Climate, doesn’t think so.
According to Greta, “We can’t save the world by playing by the rules” because “our civilisation is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money”.
She’s right. Those with vested interests in polluting industries like fossil fuels, and the politicians who serve them, won’t give in without a fight. Disruptive and defiant mass protests have forced the issue of climate change to the centre of politics, an issue the rich and powerful would rather ignore. 
Now is the time to keep building on that momentum. We need a mass movement to keep the pressure up and show those in power we are prepared to disrupt their precious economy in order to preserve the planet for future generations.
Philp is right about one thing: “We will soon be unable to look our children in the eyes and tell them it will be OK unless we act fast and act big”. As capitalism propels us toward climate catastrophe, I couldn’t look my potential kids in the eyes if I hadn’t been at that rally.

Climate criminals, not climate activists, should be jailed

Speaking out against deaths in custody shame

Why I will bother attending another climate rally

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